2013 – 14 Conferences

Colloquium

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Laurentian University’s Thought and Culture Seminar, we have organized a colloquium around the following theme:

The entrepreneurial university in neoliberal times

Abstract

As an institution firmly embedded in society, the university has always suffered the social, cultural, and political tension of its times. What most characterizes the university of today is perhaps the great influence exerted on it by economic considerations. In fact, we could characterise the university of today—that we call the neoliberal university—by its explicit intension to bend to the demands of the neoliberal economy. This new conception of the university which behaves like a business, is guided, effectively, by the effort to bring forth solutions to the problems posed by this economic system; it carries the values that this economy favours (for example, individualism, efficiency, the technologisation of human action, etc.).

However, has the university not always been at the service of society? Has it not always been at the center of the western project of a rational civilization? What social dimensions seem to be sidelined by the mandate it sets for itself? How does it foresee the synthesis of the over-production of knowledge with which it blissfully engages itself? How does it respond, for example, to the great demands surounding the problem of multiculturalism? How does it adress the problems of poverty, of the equitable distribution of wealth, and issues of social justice?